This Is It

Geese in concert

Welcome back to Play a Song For Me, a chronicle of live music.

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As a lad, my father and I bonded over the things all fathers and sons bond over: sports and media.

Most important was our shared affinity for rock music. He was a graduate of the early Los Angeles punk rock scene. As such, he took pride in his taste, remaining aware of and passionate about new bands well into middle age. Consequently, I was a bit precocious in this regard, and I got into “good” music much earlier than my peers. While other 13 year-olds at A.E. Wright Middle School spent most of 2006 listening to warmed-over classic rock of the most disreputable sort—KISS, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi—I was obsessing over the third Strokes record (secret masterpiece), the first Arctic Monkeys record (still holds up), and the second Keane record (look, nobody bats 1.000).

Not only did my father and I listen to these albums together, we also went to shows. In no particular order, some highlights from this general era, recalled off-top my head: The White Stripes at the Greek Theater in 2003; The Killers opening for Morrissey at the Fonda in 2004, pre-Hot Fuss; Franz Ferdinand somewhere (the Palladium maybe?) in 2005. It was a great time to be going to rock concerts, regardless of your age.

While I was younger than most of the people at these shows, my father was much older. Even then, I was dimly aware that this was something out of the ordinary, something special. The music belonged to me, but it meant a great deal to him too. He was a cultural trespasser, a generational traitor of the best kind. He knew what these experiences could mean to a young man—catching the right show in the right room at the right time. Decades earlier, he had been there himself. Now it was my turn.

He and I are both several decades older now, as is the medium that we love. We’ve hit our ups and downs, but we’ve muddled through it all—the manufactured hype cycles, the uninspired openers, the crowds full of chompers. The investment has paid off. Today, we’re in the midst of a new bull market for rock: MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, Alvvays, Big Thief, and many more.

Geese, of course, is the latest addition to this list. Their new LP, Getting Killed, is easily the best of a certain type of album to be released in 2025. It may also be the best album of the year full stop, but I’ve learned to hedge my bets a bit in my old age. There are too many lifers doing too many casually incredible things for me to write them all off in favor of the latest gaggle of New York twentysomethings.

Still, it’s clear that Getting Killed is the best record this year from a future great—a band destined to mean as much to a certain cohort of rock fans as Radiohead or The Strokes or Silver Jews mean to me. The songs on Getting Killed explode out of the stereo with so much life, so much rhythm, so much strangeness, you can’t help but dig it. It’s elemental. There’s no formula here, no way to explain why it all works as well as it does. And yet it does.

Every track on the record seems to preview a different potential future, from the crystalline guitar pop of “Taxes” to the bombed-out skronk rock of “Trinidad” to the downbeat pathos of “Au Pays du Cocaine.” Any one of these directions could sustain an entire career, but here they are, packed tight into one single album. “Cobra” is probably my single favorite song of the year: elastic, propulsive, catchy as hell and equally weird, with lead singer Cameron Winter doing something I’m compelled to describe as a Frank Sinatra impression while singing about a genealogical sense of shame. At three minutes four seconds, it’s not nearly long enough—the perfect length. Betcha can’t listen just once.

Judging by the reaction online, I’m not the only one that feels this way. The band recently made their network television debut, Getting Killed is a year-end list lock, and tickets for the current tour are pushing four figures on certain resale sites. For Geese, it’s all happening.

We’ve been here before, but that doesn’t make it any less thrilling. There is seeing a band, and then there is seeing a band at the moment. The moment drives people mad—makes them post incessantly about attending (🙋‍♂️); makes them walk up down the queue outside begging someone, anyone, to sell them a ticket; suffuses the entire area in and around the venue with a nervous, antic energy. This, I can confirm, is what it felt like at the beautiful Fillmore here in San Francisco this past Tuesday.

The many roving packs of Zoomers made one thing immediately, abundantly clear: Geese does not belong to me. My generation’s time in the sun is past, our moments fully behind us. The kids have come up from behind. That is fine—and certainly much better than the alternative. Thank god (some) rock music still means something to (some) young people.

To be sure, there were still plenty of aging Millennials about, even a few Xers, all of us hoping our belief in the moment would bear out. It’s a bit like trading equities. Plenty of people pile in eventually, but the earlier you invest, the greater the return. Catching Geese on this tour doesn’t mean you’re getting in on the seed round, maybe not even Series A or B, but it’s not long after the IPO. Assuredly, over these next several years, “line go up.” In certain cases, this turns bands into the artistic equivalent of a meme stock, a vehicle for clout arbitrage. This, I hoped, would not be the case with Geese.

Inside, it was buzzing, people flitting back and forth in the lobby finding friends, grabbing drinks, eating apples. The line for merch was a dozen deep, the main room seemingly already at capacity despite the hundreds still queued up outside. I picked my way up front, just beyond the perimeter of any pit that might form.

A man in a wide-brimmed leather hat struck up a conversation with me, asked me if I knew whether the band was playing the same set every night. I told him I wasn’t sure but that they didn’t have many songs so it was possible, and that he should check setlist.fm later to confirm. He had never heard of the website but was thrilled to learn it existed, and he asked me to repeat its name several times to ensure that he remembered it. I discovered later that he was high on DMT. Shortly thereafter, the band came on.

It was a simple stage set up: no screens, no banners, nothing for the audience to pay attention to beyond the players. This is the advantage of playing such a small room, and a big part of the reason people are so desperate to get into these shows. It’s an unmediated experience—just you, the band, and everyone else around you. The more people are wedged into loges, balconies, and distant corners, the more technology interferes. Sooner or later, the realities of touring economics will force the band into these venues.

But that’s a problem for another day. Today, the Geese show is simple, pure, natural. There’s an unmistakable whiff of the Velvet Underground to the set up: all black everything, dramatic lighting, little chatter between themselves or the crowd. Eventually, Winter starts cracking wise, but judiciously. When he does, the rest of the band hardly reacts.

They’re a New York band, in other words. They take themselves seriously—especially when in California.

Which is not to say it’s an overly-serious show. Things were buoyant from the jump, kids in the crowd trying and failing to sing along to Getting Killed highlights (Winter is a devilishly difficult singer to imitate, but that didn’t stop anyone at the Fillmore). Despite the fact that these songs have only been out in the world for a month, they all sounded like classics, and they were received as such. By the time the band hit the gas with the title track, the room was ready to explode. The pit burst open and young men barged past me, drawn like a magnet to all the sweat and spilled beer and elbows.

After running through half the new album, they shifted to the 3D Country material, and the night really got started. Moshing that had paused momentarily during “Half Real” resumed in earnest, in thrall to lead guitarist Emily Green. Winter and his mop top are obviously the stars of the show, but she provides a vital counterpoint on stage right: lithe, mysterious, cool as hell; a distinctly Cale-ian figure. Precise at certain points, blunt at others, always huge—on the old songs especially.

As great as it is, I don’t think 3D Country is nearly as strong as Getting Killed. It may, however, be better suited for live performance. Songs that feel like mazes on the album become skullcracking singalongs on stage. Everyone in the crowd seemed to know every line of every verse, turning simple refrains (“Get out, get under”) into opportunities for cathartic, communal release. The formal meaning of these words may remain obscure (“Chikki-chikki-cha, chikki-chikki-cha”), but the emotional meaning couldn’t be any clearer.

The last third of the show was devoted to the rest of Getting Killed. Everyone’s well aware of how special this record is, the band most of all; by the time the night was over, they’d played every single song. Winter sauntered over to the piano and led the crew through a positively vicious “Long Island City” to close the main set. They went through the whole encore charade (some things never change), then returned for a mellow take on “Domoto” and “4D Country,” clearly exhausted after 90 minutes of pure momentum, before wrapping for good with “Trinidad.” The crowd went over the edge, screaming, ecstatic. For Geese, “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR” is destined to become their “LAST NITE, SHE SAID.”

I walked out sweaty as hell, exhausted, entirely satisfied. Best rock show I’ve seen all year, plain and simple.

And what of the moment? Undoubtedly, there’s an element of scarcity and #FOMO to this whole thing. The dream of the internet has manifested a reality in which every day presents another opportunity to tell someone “you had to be there.” If we’re being entirely honest, you didn’t: it’s only a concert, after all.

But in another sense, you did. Geese will never play rooms this small again. They will get bigger and better and, god willing, weirder, but for them, there will never be another moment. This is it. You can put whatever price you want on that.

For me, that price was zero—such are the perks of hosting a moderately successful rock music podcast. I would’ve gladly paid fifty bucks, and probably even a hundred; beyond that, it would’ve been hard to stomach. But I was only there on my own. One day, I’ll be going to these shows with a daughter or son of my own, a precious being for whom my old world is all new. They will be searching for their first moments, and I will do whatever I can to provide them, as my father did for me decades ago.

That’s the thing about rock songs: we keep getting older, but they stay the same age.